She turns coffee into books so she can afford to buy more coffee. And more books.

The Spam Awards

They’ll try every trick in the book – emails with subject lines like, ‘Here’s that thing we talked about!’, faxes from Nigeria, fake Twitter accounts with real people’s heads – to get you to buy Viagra, visit their site about a secret that will make you money and lose weight or order a faux iPad from China, and all this with practically zero chance of success. You have to admire their determination.

What I really love though are blog comment spammers. They just crack me up. They run a chunk of their native language through an internet translation program, attach a link to some penis enlargement product and try to get it past Word Press’ spam filters, which luckily is like trying to get past US Immigration in Shannon Airport without a return flight.

Still, their adventures in English amuse me. (Was it Everything is Illuminated in which the narrator had learned English from a thesaurus? Because that cracked me up too, and this kind of reminds me of it.) Here are my favorite chunks of spam as caught in the nets of my Askimet spam blocker on Catherine, Caffeinated. Enjoy.

in 5th place… The Superb Operator

“I found your weblog site on google and check a few of your early posts. Continue to maintain up the superb operate. I just extra up your RSS feed to my MSN News Reader. Searching for forward to reading more from you later on!?”

in 4th place… The Stroll-By

“This website online is mostly a stroll-by way of for all of the info you wanted about this and didn’t know who to ask. Glimpse here, and also you’ll positively discover it.”

joined in 3rd place… The Pretend Profound

“Everything should be made as simple as possible … but not simpler.”

and

“No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.” ~ Oscar Wilde (from a weight loss cleanse spammer, no less)

in 2nd place… The Free Breakfast

“A formidable share, I just given this onto a colleague who was doing a bit evaluation on this. And he in fact purchased me breakfast as a result of I discovered it for him.. smile. So let me reword that: Thnx for the treat! But yeah Thnkx for spending the time to discuss this, I really feel strongly about it and love studying extra on this topic. If doable, as you develop into experience, would you thoughts updating your weblog with more details? It is extremely useful for me. Big thumb up for this blog publish!”

and in 1st place… The Um, Sorry – Could You Repeat That?

“Valuable, they demand to be taught that filing lawsuits is not the arbitration to jeopardy an outcome to piracy. A substitute alternatively, it’s to breath something romp than piracy. Like repress of use. It’s unequivocally a elephantine numbers easier to corruption iTunes than to search the Internet with gamble of malware and then crappy exaltation, but if people are expected to augment loads and palm depression of to repayment on the side of ages, it’s not moneyed to work. They unbigoted be subjected to a draw together in promote people fashion software and Spider’s trap sites that amount to it ridiculously indistinct to corsair, and up the quality. If that happens, then there work out be no stopping piracy. But they’re too on the qui vive and frightened of losing. Risks well-groomed up to be fascinated!”*

*This spam was brought to you by something called ‘Beercream.’ No, really.

Hysterical! I love getting this kind of Spam – it’s so much more interesting than a string of letters that make no sense and occupies my time while I decide whether to allow it as a comment or not. (Always touch & go on a post with few comments!)

That’s why appreciate them so much – although I probably wouldn’t appreciate them if WordPress didn’t catch them first. I just love how they make a (very) strange sense.

Like this sentence:

“It’s unequivocally a elephantine numbers easier to corruption iTunes than to search the Internet with gamble of malware and then crappy exaltation, but if people are expected to augment loads and palm depression of to repayment on the side of ages, it’s not moneyed to work.”

Spam is great. There is a book series by Megan McCafferty in which one of the main characters would compose haikus from random spam e-mails he received. I think you should start doing that; it would be endlessly entertaining for us and a great writing excercise for you!